She carries it too.
Three words. We stared at them across the kitchen table, my mother
and I, in the particular silence that descends when language does
something you didn't expect it to be capable of.
The rest of the letter was longer. My mother and I read it together,
her hand finding mine at some point during the second paragraph, neither
of us quite registering the moment it happened.
To whoever opens this
If you're reading it, then the girl has arrived. She will have my
lungs and my eyes, and she will have found her way to the letters
by now, which means she's braver than she thinks she is.
I need you to understand something about LAM, because the
doctors won't tell you this not because they're hiding it, but
because they don't know it yet. There is a genetic variant
connected to the aggressive early-onset form of this disease. I
have been in contact with a researcher Dr. Sadia Okonkwo,
currently at Johns Hopkins who is studying it. She doesn't have
my results yet, but I have asked that they be preserved and made
available when the time comes.
The girl with my face will also carry this variant. But she will not
die the way I am dying. Because Dr. Okonkwo's research will be
finished by then, and there will be a treatment protocol available,
and it will work for her because I am going to make sure she gets
to it in time.
That is what these letters are for. Not just love. Not just
connection. They are a map to a treatment that doesn't exist yet,
written from a dying woman's desk to a girl who hasn't been born
yet, to make sure she finds it before it's too late.
Tell her to ask about the Johns Hopkins LAM Genetics Initiative.
Tell her to ask by name. Tell her I sent her.
With everything I have left,
Elena Voss, October 1996
My mother was crying by the time we finished. Silently, steadily, the
way she cried when she allowed herself to without drama, without apology,
the tears simply happening because they were the appropriate response to
something too large for other containers.
I was not crying. I was thinking.
I was thinking about Dr. Kaplan saying promising. About the letter
that told me to ask about the Johns Hopkins study before Dr. Kaplan raised
it. About E's consistent, impossible advance knowledge of my medical
situation.
Elena had not been writing prophecy. She had been writing a plan.
A thirty-year plan, executed from a dying woman's desk, to save a girl
she would never meet.
I called Cael at eight o'clock that evening. He was at the kitchen table
doing something I couldn't identify from the background sounds, and he
went completely still when I started talking.
I told him everything. Elena. The box. The letter. The Johns Hopkins
connection. His father and Elena. All of it, in the order it had arrived,
without editing.
He was quiet for a long time when I finished.
"Your lungs,' he said finally. 'She wrote a thirty-year research plan to
save your lungs.'"
"Essentially.'"
Another silence.
"My father knew her for ten years,' he said. 'He died without ever
telling me. Without ever telling my mother I think. She never mentioned
Elena. But then she doesn't talk much about his life before Seattle.'"
I heard something shift in his voice a layer of grief that had been
quiet becoming less quiet.
"He loved her,' Cael said. It wasn't quite a question."
"The photographs suggest yes.'"
'And she loved him enough to when she was dying to still be thinking
about the people who would come after him. About his children.' He paused.
'About me.'
I hadn't thought of it that way. Elena writing letters to me but also, in
doing so, constructing a world in which Cael and I would find each other.
Creating the circumstances of our meeting. Writing us toward each other.
She had loved Marco Marchetti for ten years, and his son was now
sitting across coffee tables from me comparing impossible letters, and she
had arranged it.
"She loved him,' I said slowly, 'and so she made sure his son would be
all right. Made sure he'd have someone who understood what it means to
live close to the edge of things.'"
Cael was quiet for so long I checked my phone to see if the call had
dropped.
"I want to tell you something,' he said finally."
"Tell me.'"
'I have been trying not to feel things about you since the first night at
Weatherfield Books.' His voice was measured, careful, like someone placing
weight on ice and testing it as they go. 'Because the letters told me I would
meet you. And I didn't want to feel something just because I was told I
would. I wanted it to be real. Not scripted.'
I understood this. Completely.
"And?' I said."
'And it is real.' A pause. 'Which is inconvenient, because I'm not I was
not planning to feel things. I was not planning to feel anything for a while.'
'Me neither,' I said. 'For the record.'
A breath that might have been a laugh. 'What do we do with that?'
"I don't know yet.' I looked out at the oak tree where Borges was a
dark shape in the dark. 'Something that isn't running away from it.'"
'That's a very low bar.'
"It's a starting bar. We can raise it.'"
Three days later, I called Dr. Kaplan.
'I need to ask you about the Johns Hopkins LAM Genetics Initiative,' I
said. 'Specifically about Dr. Sadia Okonkwo's work on early-onset variants.
And I need you to look for any preserved genetic samples from a woman
named Elena Voss, who would have been a patient in the late eighties and
nineties.'
A long silence on the line.
"Elara. How do you know about Dr. Okonkwo?'"
"It's a long story. Can you look?'"
Another silence. Then: 'I'll make some calls.'
She called me back four hours later. Her voice had a quality I hadn't
heard in it before a controlled excitement, the excitement of someone
trying very hard not to give false hope and failing slightly.
'The samples exist,' she said. 'Elena Voss's genetic samples were
preserved at a research facility in Portland. They've been sitting in archive
storage for twenty-six years waiting for someone to request them.' She
paused. 'Dr. Okonkwo's team has been looking for exactly this kind of earlyonset case study. If the variant matches what they suspect'
"Would it change my treatment options?' I asked."
'Elara.' Her voice was careful and warm and terrified all at once. 'It
might change everything.'
I sat in my room after we hung up, with the Hummingbird humming
and Borges motionless in the oak tree, and I thought about Elena at her
desk in 1996, writing letters to a girl who wouldn't exist for another two
years, executing a thirty-year plan with the calm deliberateness of someone
who understood that love is the only thing with enough range to travel that
far.
Then I picked up the phone to call Cael, and before I could dial,
a new letter came sliding under my door but this time, it was not
from E. The handwriting was different. And the name at the bottom
made the phone fall from my hand.